The Aftermath
by ZeenoMCR
Summary: Rose after Doomsday and Journey's End. She had to pick up and move on, and she had to keep saving Earth.


**Author's note: **RIGHT, so I always wondered... How did Rose react after being left at Dårlig Ulv Stranden? I know her, and she wouldn't have sobbed forever. She would've dried her tears and moved on, determined. She wouldn't have forgotten the pain, but she wouldn't have been consumed by it. So, here you go, Rose after _Doomsday_, and after _Journey's End_.

**Disclaimer: **Sweetie, if I owned Doctor Who, d'you think I would be drooling at David Tennant from behind a screen or living in Garner, NC?

* * *

I had been so weak that first day. I sat at Dårlig Ulv Stranden for five and a half hours, digging my feet into the cold sand and slowly picking knots out of my hair. Always wait five and a half hours, he'd said. When the time was up, I'd felt myself begin to sob as my watch chimed the time. My last hope was gone. No more chance of going home. Shaking, I stood and walked away.

The next day, I convinced Mum and Dad to buy a house overlooking the bay there in Norway. I lived there, alone, in the tiny place that barely had enough of a driveway for my Jeep. My bedroom walls were painted the same coral as the TARDIS's control room, and my bed had a metal frame, like my own on the TARDIS, dressed in sheets that were the same midnight blue as space. I cried myself to sleep that night, and every night that week.

The next week, I brushed out my hair and put on my best pair of slacks, and drove into Bergen. I found a job at the slowly growing Torchwood base there. They put me through university. I got my degree—a doctorate in astrophysics—in just three years. Record time for Doctor Rose Tyler. I did not forget why I was there. I worked on travel between universes, eventually coming up with what we called a Dimension Cannon. On the first test, I was put through on a street, and was subsequently hit by a car. They pulled me back immediately.

I did not try again until my bruises faded.

I began moving through the timeline, finding myself in the right universe but with so many events that were wrong. He had died, alone, without even a shot at regeneration. I put on a hard, tough exterior and fought to get him back. I sent Donna back in time, so that she could stop the one decision that had forced her to turn right instead of left. It had caused her to never meet the Doctor. In the moment when he had needed someone to stop him most of all, he had no one, and he died.

Everything was righted. I found my way back to him and he almost died again. We saved the universe. We saved all of the universes. Like old times. The old team, Shiver and Shake. But I had changed. I felt it in my bones, the hardness that had been left from the life that I had lead. I was sent back to my new universe after everything was over—watch after the Metacrisis, he'd said. But he didn't think. He didn't think that it would turn out how it did. The Metacrisis Doctor (John Smith, as he liked to be called) had died. The Time Lord mind in a human body had killed him just a month after he arrived.

I hardened more. I became a soldier. My capacity for mercy was lessened. No one could stop me—not Mum, not Dad. No one. One shot, that's all they got. And here I stand today, head of Torchwood. I am the cold woman who has no one, and wants no one. The woman whose only goal is to keep her world safe. Because she has no one. My home will not end up like his—burnt, dead, gone from a war.

And so as I fight the good fight, I know I will die alone. And I don't care anymore. My home will be safe, because I know someone will take my place after I am gone. And after them, and after them. The Earth will be safe, protected by the most ordinary people, as the motto of Torchwood says and will forever say. _Vulgus plurimum auxilio tellus._ Protection of the Earth by the most ordinary people.

And though sometimes I wonder what if, I know that this is my fate, and I accept it. Because this is who I have become and I know that I cannot change now.


End file.
